There is an assumption that tools.deps will carry a :scope "provided" into the pom.xml when -Spom is run. However, not only is it not carried over, but if it already exists in the pom.xml then it is deleted...

Thanks for the patch but we intentionally don’t support it and don’t want to add it. The clj approach is to use aliases to allow the construction of classpath variants. If you want this in your pom, you will need to maintain your own pom.